Undated Self-Portrait, Vivian Maier
Last Wednesday, the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum opened Vivian Maier: Photography's Lost Voice, an exhibit of work from a woman who's been described as a "mysterious photographer-nanny." Most people know Maier's work via the 2013 documentary Finding Vivian Maier, but a lot more information has come to light since that film's release. And a lot of it is thanks Ann Marks, a retired executive who has some serious people-finding skills that she put to work in order to dig up concrete information about Maier. Marks is currently putting the finishing touches on an extensive biography that will be released this fall, but St. Louisans can get a sneak preview of that work—much of revising the portrait of Maier that we have now—when Marks lectures at IPHF this Saturday. We spoke with her by phone about the talk, her book, and her understanding of Maier's work.
Do you want to start by outlining a few of the things you’ll be covering at the talk this weekend?
My main goal is to help people understand Vivian Maier the person, and her life history, and to place her photographs in the context of that, for better understanding and appreciation of them. I’ve really been able to trace her life now from the very beginning to the very end. I’ve talked to a lot of people who knew her and her family. I think I have a pretty good idea about the kind of person she was, and what she went through, and her goals—as much as you can when someone’s not around—and how those things impacted her photography.
Are you going to be using images of her photographs as part of the talk, then? What’s the format?
I’ll have a PowerPoint that I’ll just sort of use casually, and I have pictures of course that people haven’t seen of her family, and life. And then I’m going to pick some of the examples from the exhibit to use to make different points.
You saw the documentary, and then got curious. But a lot of people have been curious. You actually threw yourself into solving a lot of these mysteries around Maier’s life.
What happened was, I saw the documentary and I was obviously taken with Vivian and her story, but I was surprised that there was so little information about her life and her family. Most of it was from Chicago. Even though top genealogists were involved, they really couldn’t find her brother, know much about her before then. There was a lot of conflicting information. I have a background in research; I’m a retired business executive. I’m the one my friends always came to when they wanted to stalk someone on the internet [laughs]. I was kind of known for being able to do this. So I thought, I’ll bet I can solve this.
I focused first on her brother. I was able to find out what happened to him, and Cook County got interested. I didn’t even know this at the time, I didn’t know anything but the movie really, but they were just starting to look for the brother for the estate. They hadn’t been able to locate him, because there was a lot of conflicting information, particularly on him, and a lack of information. So a lot of people got excited, and they put me on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. I had already reached out to people publically working on Vivian Maier, different researchers and owners, including Jeff Goldstein and John Maloof.
Then, with that little bit of success, they all got interested in working with me. John Maloof and Jeff offered me their archives to study, they owned 98 percent of Vivian Maier’s photographs. I was given hard drives of 140,000 photographs. I studied them for clues; there weren’t very many notes at all. It was difficult, but I was able to find people that knew Vivian and her relatives through that, through a long process. I wrote up an article for the New York Times Lens blog, and they published it. Then everyone started to ask me to write a book, and so completed the whole story. I studied her from beginning to end. I have her biography coming out in September.
In those blog posts, you talk about how she was maybe mentored by an older photographer, Jeanne Bertrand, and how her grandmother, Eugenie, was the only person who didn’t treat Vivian “like wallpaper,” which seems significant.
I actually learned even more about that. And I think that’s true. I don’t think Vivian knew Bertrand all that well. Her mother knew Betrand. And Vivian’s mother actually had a camera before most people did in the 1930s. They had lived with Bertrand, so I think that might’ve been more the influence. Eugenie was the matriarch of the family, and a really great, giving person. She had a really positive influence on Vivian. In a series of letters, it’s a whole separate story, but it was really the genealogical jackpot in the archives at Albany, when her brother was in the reformatory at Coxsackie, all the family wrote letters to one another. The only person who ever mentioned Vivian was Eugenie. I think that everyone else was too troubled to bother with her.
Though for coming from such a dysfunctional family, she seems to have really managed to create a wonderful, creative life for herself, which seems to really upend these stereotypes people have of her being mentally ill, a hoarder, a recluse, an eccentric…
That’s exactly right. I feel like she was so intelligent, so inquisitive, so talented, that despite everything that happened, she was able to pull together her resources and really put together a very satisfying life for herself. I think her story’s not sad at all. I think it’s inspiring. This is a woman who had nothing, and she traveled around the world, she met all kinds of fascinating people. The most interesting thing for me was when I finally heard her tapes. She made a bunch of tape recordings where she interviewed people. When you’re not seeing her and not hearing what everyone else has to say about her, she sounds so charming, and intelligent, and kind. I started to really like her when I actually could get a firsthand impression. I just think she had a very complicated childhood. She was very influenced by her upbringing in rural France. I just got back from there, meeting with her relatives. You can really see how she developed the persona she did. The seeds are there in her community in France. A lot of people misunderstood that, in suburbia. On the hoarding—she did have a severe hoarding issue. It got worse and worse. Most people believe the cause is having a traumatic childhood. But it didn’t make her mentally disabled in any way, she was smart, funny and well-read till the end. What it did, though, was it completely took over her life. First of all, people knew she had it, and so the way people viewed her was as an oddball. Everywhere she went she had all these newspapers she was collecting. Then her collection of possessions was so large that she was renting so many storage lockers it was taking all of her money. And then she was losing jobs, staring in the 80s and 90s because they were fire hazards and the floors of her room were buckling. It was really debilitating. She became more paranoid, afraid she was going to lose her possessions, because that’s what the disease is. It was a part of herself, and it mattered to her more than anything. It’s important to discuss it because it affected her so much, and so that it’s understood in what way it affected her, because it now seems pretty clear that’s why she didn’t share her photography later in life. All the comments of her not sharing her photographs were really from Chicago, when she was older. And that was when her hoarding disorder was really kicking in. She kept everything, and she didn’t need to develop her film. She didn’t need to process it, she didn’t need to print it. She just needed to keep it. It was part of her possessions. People have misunderstood that as thinking she didn’t want to share her photographs, and in fact we’ve found recently that she tried to be a commercial photographer in New York. She really was practicing and training and trying to make connections, and as a woman breaking into photography with absolutely no education or real connections form the start, it was very difficult at that time. So she wasn’t able to get it off the ground. She was really a nanny so she could support her efforts to do that, it just never took off for a variety of reasons. So it doesn’t really seem true that she wouldn’t share her work, which is a pretty big finding. And the idea that she was shy – she was very confident at bold. She wasn’t shy at all.
Yes, those excerpts from the tapes in the documentary make it pretty clear she was an extrovert.
Yes, she just carried a tape recorder around with her, and interviewed people! I think she was sort of role-playing what she wanted to be. I think she wanted to be a photojournalist, and so she just started to be one on her own.
To circle back to the photographs themselves—she gets classified as a street photographer, but it seems like her work was much broader than that.
In fact, when I start off in the book, talking about her work in New York, the first couple of years after she got her Rollieflex camera, starting in 1952, over the next two years she practiced every single genre of photography that you could mention. She did candid portraits, she did studio portraits, she did photojournalism, she did street photography, she did celebrity photography, she was like a paparazzi. She did a lot of landscapes. In fact, most of the work she printed was landscapes. She did almost everything you could mention. People use the label street photography kind of broadly, to me if I had a characterize her specialty or point of difference, she was really able to capture the universality of the human experience. You feel an emotion of some sort when you see her photographs, whether they’re portraits on the street, or whatever, she had the ability to hone in on that and capture that. Which is ironic, because she was emotionally stilted. And a lot of people felt she was cold, and she didn’t have relationships, she really only could have friendships with children and older ladies. I think she went through an awful lot. It’s so amazing that through her photography she could experience emotion and capture it. She definitely positions herself as the outsider in a lot of her shots, where she’s behind trees or shooting through archways. She’s not part of it, but she’s observing it in astute way.
She also was kind of a pioneer of the selfie.
Some of us feel like those were her most groundbreaking photographs, her self-portraits. I sprinkle them and their development throughout my narrative. They’re so important first because they’re her way of inserting herself into the action. She did it so frequently, so you have to believe it had some meaning to her. Secondly, she was so creative. She started in New York with reflections, first just in mirrors on Fifth Avenue. Then it was her reflection in hubcaps and vending machines. Then she got the idea of inserting herself via shadow, and she did so many creative things with that using props like magazines. There’s often things going through her heart. I can tie actually some of the self-portraits with some of the things that were going on in her life, and her feelings. I have something like 500 photographs in the biography, so I’m trying to use the pictures to really narrate her life, and to show her broad range of work. Not just what you’ve seen in galleries. I felt like I really had to dig for evidence and facts to get underneath the stories that have already been told. I looked for anything concrete that I could, because I wanted to develop my own picture, because that I saw that it was emerging in a way that was different from the beginning. Which isn’t surprising, because in the beginning they could only find people from the end of her life. She’d lived in New York for 30 years, and not one person could be found that knew her then. It’s because when she moved to Chicago, she shut her door on New York. She never told anyone about it. She didn’t keep contacts. So no one even knew about it.
And she had her reasons for that, it sounds like.
Right. It wasn’t like some crazy private thing, she had a terrible family and wanted to get away from them. She didn’t want her employers to know she came from a family where her brother was a drug addict and had been in psychiatric hospitals. And they were money-grubbing. She didn’t want them coming after her, and blowing her cover. It was very rational.
It seems like American culture was so different then, too, as far as its patience and understanding of things like mental illness and addiction.
I’ll tell you something else, and I didn’t even think about this—I was just over in France, and they were explaining to me their extreme Catholic culture, and she was raised with that during her formative years. First of all, she was an illegitimate child. They were telling me that no matter what happened, no matter how bad, like they had an aunt that was battered, people didn’t talk about it. You just sucked it up and were stoic, and went about your business, and that’s how she was raised.
And yet she was so forward-thinking. In the 1950s, she was interested in race relations, she was a feminist. She was interested in Native American rights, she was so before her time. It’s amazing to think of where she got this social conscience. It was so deep. I don’t think her immediate family gave it to her. Maybe her grandmother, but maybe she developed it on her own.
Ann Marks delivers her lecture, Vivian Maier Developed: The Real Story of the Photographer Nanny on March 3 at the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, 3415 Olive, from 1:30–2:45 p.m. General admission is $10, or $5 for members. Vivian Maier: Photography’s Lost Voice will be on display through May 26. For more info, go to iphf.org.
